Dear friends,

I hope you'll forgive me, but after some months where you haven't heard from us at all, you are now about to face a veritable torrent (at least by our standards) of postings, because - after several months of extremely hard work behind the scenes - it is all beginning to come together, and over the next few weeks a heck of a lot is going to be happening.

I am in a bit of a quandary here, because I have an innate dislike of people who post on these newsgroups over and over again, mostly in order to promote their own activities, and postings on their own blogs. I know that at least one well-respected newsgroup closed down recently because of this very reason. In his valedictory message, the group owner (and I have to paraphrase, because I did not keep the original message) said that the Internet is changing, and that now blogs and forums are of more importance than newsgroups, and that he was not prepared to carry on running a newsgroup which had degenerated into a mere advertising board for other people's writings. I entirely agree with him, but there is so much happening at the moment, that I am forced to do what I don't really want to, and to send out far more postings than I would otherwise feel comfortable doing.

More years ago than I care to remember, my first wife bought me a birthday present. It was a book about the mystery animals of Britain and Ireland, and I devoured it avidly. When I finished, I was horribly disappointed. It had covered the mystery cats of the country in some depth, as it had done with the black dog legends, and a smattering of more arcane `things` (as the late, great Ivan T. Sanderson would doubtless have dubbed them) such as the Owlman of Mawnan, and the Big Grey Man of Ben McDhui. But there was so much that I knew that the author had simply left out.

Where were the mystery pine martens of the westcountry? Where were the Sutherland polecats? Where was the mysterious butterfly known as Albin’s Hampstead Eye? This was an Australian butterfly, the type specimen of which was caught in a cellar in Hampstead (hence the name) but no-one knows how or why? Where were the butterflies, moths, birds and even mammals known from the British Isles on the basis of a handful of specimens only? And where were the local oddities; the semi-folkloric beasts only known from a specific location.

Although at the time I had no pretensions to being a writer, I started to collect information from around the country, and with the benefit of hindsight it is probably with my disappointment with my 27th birthday present that the seeds of what would eventually grow into the Centre for Fortean Zoology were planted.

Nearly twenty years later to the day, I was sat in my garden at the Centre for Fortean Zoology [CFZ] in North Devon, sharing a bottle of wine with my wife Corinna, and my old friends Richard Freeman and Mike Hallowell. The subject of my disappointing 27th birthday present came up, and someone suggested that we do our best to redress the balance. CFZ Press, the publishing arm of the CFZ, has become the largest dedicated fortean zoological publishers in the world, and we are now in the position to put my vague daydreams of a couple of decades ago into action. We decided that rather than trying to publish one enormous tome covering the mystery animals of the whole of the British Isles (which, by the way, geographically, if not politically, includes the Republic of Ireland, but excludes the Channel Islands) we would be much happier presenting this vast array of data in a series of books, each covering a county or two. Then we realised the enormity of what we were proposing: The series would probably end up being something in the region of forty volumes in length!

However, never ones to back away from a challenge, we decided to go ahead with the project, and now - six months later - the first books in the series are being published.

It seems fitting, that - as he was there at the inception - Mike Hallowell should have the honour of being the author of the first book in the series. I am glad that he is, because it is a stonker!

We argued the toss for months over how we were going to format the series. For a long time we were intending to have a rigid format for all the books, somewhat akin to the Observer’s books of the British countryside. But then we decided `No`. There are as many kinds of researcher as there are mystery animal, and it would - we felt - be more in keeping with the ethos of the CFZ, if we allowed each researcher to present his or her findings in their own inimitable style. The books, therefore, will reflect the character of the individual author.

Some will be poetic verging on mystical. Some will be matter of fact scientific. Some will be from the point of view of a naturalist, and some from the point of view of a folklorist. Some will be short, some will be long. Some will be full of scientific theorising, and some full of metaphysical speculation. But one thing is sure: Whoever gets one of these volumes for their 27th birthday present…..

....They won’t be disappointed!

The publishing information for the first volume is as follows:

The book will be available in the next few days.

We are proud to announce the authors of the next few volumes, which will be published in the next twelve months or so:

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Kent by Neil Arnold

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Dorset by Jonathan McGowan

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Staffordshire by Nick Redfern

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Co Durham and Humberside by Mike Hallowell

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Greater London by Neil Arnold

The Mystery Animals of the British Isles: Devon and Cornwall by Jonathan Downes

I hope that you will agree with us that this is an extremely worthwhile series, and I hope that you will decide to support us,

Until the next bulletin,

Yours

Jon Downes